Dr. Elia Tomás

Development of biotechnological processes for bioethanol production from lignocellulosic biomass

E-mail:

elia.tomas@imdea.org

Short Bio:

She obtained a Master on Environmental Science in 2005 by the Universidad Jaime I of Castellón. In 2009, she got her PhD with European Mention in Microbiology at the Universidad Complutense of Madrid with a thesis work entitled “Bioethanol production from wheat straw: strategies for process integration”. During her PhD studies she was visiting student at the Technical University of Denmark (Lyngby, Dinamarca) and at Chalmers University of Technology (Gothenburg, Sweden) where she worked with xylose fermenting yeasts optimizing its utilization for bioethanol production as well as improving its tolerance to inhibitors by evolutionary engineering. After her PhD, she worked as a Postdoctoral project assistant for almost two years at CIEMAT in the Biofuels Unit. From March 2011 to February 2013 she worked as Postdoctoral Researcher in the Industrial Biotechnology Group at Chalmers University of Technology in Sweden where she evaluated and developed xylose fermenting yeast strains to further improve sugar consumption capacity, robustness and inhibitor tolerance. At Chalmers, she also supervised Master Thesis and gave lectures in PhD courses.

She has been working in the bioethanol field since 2005. She has studied different configuration processes, optimized process conditions and done studies on yeast physiology, adaptation and propagation. She has participated in European and National R&D projects being Principal Investigator in one of them. She has presented the obtained results in International and National Conferences in different posters as well as oral presentations. Dr. Tomás-Pejó is co-author of 35 peer-reviewed papers and book chapters and co-inventor of 2 patents. She is part of the Editorial Advisory Board of the open access journal “Bioethanol” and acts as reviewer of international journals.